LinuxQuestions.org - How to check if a string inside file is longer than 50 characters.

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How to check if a string inside file is longer than 50 characters.

Hi,

I am wondering if it is possible to use find and grep to search inside files to check if there is a string longer than 50 characters inside files.

Thanks,

To search in one file:

Code:

grep -e '[^\ ]\{50,\}' /path/to/file

Recursive search:

Code:

grep -Re '[^\ ]\{50,\}' /path/to/directory

It would help if you gave a few more details. What constitutes a "string"? Do you mean whitespace-delimited characters? Whole lines? What? Perhaps you could give us a bit of sample text?

The suggestion given above searches for strings of 50 or more consecutive non-space characters. You can avoid the backslashes, however, by using the "-E" extended regex option, and you don't need to use "-e" when there's only a single expression.

Code:

grep -E '[^[:space:]]{50,}' /path/to/file

Notice that I also replaced the simple space with the "[:space:]" character class, which covers all whitespace characters.

"[^\ ]" is wrong in either version, BTW, as it means "not a backslash or a space". All simple characters are considered literal when inside a regex bracket expression except for "^","-", and "]", and even those are made unspecial by placing them in certain positions inside the brackets (i.e. "^" is only special if it's the first character in the list).

Here is the examples of the strings:

xGaaSZgwC2bw5Fl2RaWS1yw
2ecacebe01e77fe2dd40

Thank you!

Thank you all. I got my answer with your help.